In the mean time, owing to the preliminary activity and tact of his agents and advisers, the Sunday newspapers were vying with one another in describing the wonders of his new house in New York—its cost, the value of its ground, the wealthy citizens with whom the Cowperwoods would now be neighbors.
There were double-column pictures of Aileen and Cowperwood, with articles indicating them as prospective entertainers on a grand scale who would unquestionably be received because of their tremendous wealth.
As a matter of fact, this was purely newspaper gossip and speculation.
While the general columns made news and capital of his wealth, special society columns, which dealt with the ultra-fashionable, ignored him entirely.
Already the machination of certain Chicago social figures in distributing information as to his past was discernible in the attitude of those clubs, organizations, and even churches, membership in which constitutes a form of social passport to better and higher earthly, if not spiritual, realms.
His emissaries were active enough, but soon found that their end was not to be gained in a day.
Many were waiting locally, anxious enough to get in, and with social equipments which the Cowperwoods could scarcely boast.
After being blackballed by one or two exclusive clubs, seeing his application for a pew at St. Thomas’s quietly pigeon-holed for the present, and his invitations declined by several multimillionaires whom he met in the course of commercial transactions, he began to feel that his splendid home, aside from its final purpose as an art-museum, could be of little value.
At the same time Cowperwood’s financial genius was constantly being rewarded by many new phases of materiality chiefly by an offensive and defensive alliance he was now able to engineer between himself and the house of Haeckelheimer, Gotloeb & Co.
Seeing the iron manner in which he had managed to wrest victory out of defeat after the first seriously contested election, these gentlemen had experienced a change of heart and announced that they would now gladly help finance any new enterprise which Cowperwood might undertake.
Among many other financiers, they had heard of his triumph in connection with the failure of American Match.
“Dot must be a right cleffer man, dot Cowperwood,” Mr. Gotloeb told several of his partners, rubbing his hands and smiling.
“I shouldt like to meet him.”
And so Cowperwood was manoeuvered into the giant banking office, where Mr. Gotloeb extended a genial hand.
“I hear much of Chicawkgo,” he explained, in his semi-German, semi-Hebraic dialect, “but almozd more uff you.
Are you goink to swallow up all de street-railwaiss unt elefated roats out dere?”
Cowperwood smiled his most ingenuous smile.
“Why?
Would you like me to leave a few for you?”
“Not dot exzagly, but I might not mint sharink in some uff dem wit you.”
“You can join with me at any time, Mr. Gotloeb, as you must know.
The door is always very, very wide open for you.”
“I musd look into dot some more.
It loogs very promising to me.
I am gladt to meet you.”
The great external element in Cowperwood’s financial success—and one which he himself had foreseen from the very beginning—was the fact that Chicago was developing constantly.
What had been when he arrived a soggy, messy plain strewn with shanties, ragged sidewalks, a higgledy-piggledy business heart, was now truly an astounding metropolis which had passed the million mark in population and which stretched proud and strong over the greater part of Cook County.
Where once had been a meager, makeshift financial section, with here and there only a splendid business building or hotel or a public office of some kind, there were now canon-like streets lined with fifteen and even eighteen story office buildings, from the upper stories of which, as from watch-towers, might be surveyed the vast expanding regions of simple home life below.
Farther out were districts of mansions, parks, pleasure resorts, great worlds of train-yards and manufacturing areas.
In the commercial heart of this world Frank Algernon Cowperwood had truly become a figure of giant significance.
How wonderful it is that men grow until, like colossi, they bestride the world, or, like banyan-trees, they drop roots from every branch and are themselves a forest—a forest of intricate commercial life, of which a thousand material aspects are the evidence.
His street-railway properties were like a net—the parasite Gold Thread—linked together as they were, and draining two of the three important “sides” of the city.
In 1886, when he had first secured a foothold, they had been capitalized at between six and seven millions (every device for issuing a dollar on real property having been exhausted).
To-day, under his management, they were capitalized at between sixty and seventy millions.
The majority of the stock issued and sold was subject to a financial device whereby twenty per cent. controlled eighty per cent., Cowperwood holding that twenty per cent. and borrowing money on it as hypothecated collateral.
In the case of the West Side corporation, a corporate issue of over thirty millions had been made, and these stocks, owing to the tremendous carrying power of the roads and the swelling traffic night and morning of poor sheep who paid their hard-earned nickels, had a market value which gave the road an assured physical value of about three times the sum for which it could have been built.
The North Chicago company, which in 1886 had a physical value of little more than a million, could not now be duplicated for less than seven millions, and was capitalized at nearly fifteen millions.
The road was valued at over one hundred thousand dollars more per mile than the sum for which it could actually have been replaced.
Pity the poor groveling hack at the bottom who has not the brain-power either to understand or to control that which his very presence and necessities create.
These tremendous holdings, paying from ten to twelve per cent. on every hundred-dollar share, were in the control, if not in the actual ownership, of Cowperwood.
Millions in loans that did not appear on the books of the companies he had converted into actual cash, wherewith he had bought houses, lands, equipages, paintings, government bonds of the purest gold value, thereby assuring himself to that extent of a fortune vaulted and locked, absolutely secure.
After much toiling and moiling on the part of his overworked legal department he had secured a consolidation, under the title of the Consolidated Traction Company of Illinois, of all outlying lines, each having separate franchises and capitalized separately, yet operated by an amazing hocus-pocus of contracts and agreements in single, harmonious union with all his other properties.
The North and West Chicago companies he now proposed to unite into a third company to be called the Union Traction Company. By taking up the ten and twelve per cent. issues of the old North and West companies and giving two for one of the new six-per-cent one-hundred-dollar-share Union Traction stocks in their stead, he could satisfy the current stockholders, who were apparently made somewhat better off thereby, and still create and leave for himself a handsome margin of nearly eighty million dollars.
With a renewal of his franchises for twenty, fifty, or one hundred years he would have fastened on the city of Chicago the burden of yielding interest on this somewhat fictitious value and would leave himself personally worth in the neighborhood of one hundred millions.
This matter of extending his franchises was a most difficult and intricate business, however.
It involved overcoming or outwitting a recent and very treacherous increase of local sentiment against him.
This had been occasioned by various details which related to his elevated roads.
To the two lines already built he now added a third property, the Union Loop. This he prepared to connect not only with his own, but with other outside elevated properties, chief among which was Mr. Schryhart’s South Side “L.”
He would then farm out to his enemies the privilege of running trains on this new line.
However unwillingly, they would be forced to avail themselves of the proffered opportunity, because within the region covered by the new loop was the true congestion—here every one desired to come either once or twice during the day or night.